Now granted this reality of free voluntary action, it will hardly be denied that history discloses to us a practically universal prevalence of sin[6], in the present and in the past; and we can hardly fail to perceive, lying behind actual sins, a tendency to sin--what Shelley calls 'the ineradicable taint of sin,' a perverse inclination inhering in the stock of our manhood, which is what theology calls original sin.
III.--But here a more modern objection occurs. Christianity assumes that this moral flaw or taint, weakness or grossness, in human nature is the outcome of actual transgressions, in other words that original sin is due to actual sin, whereas the tendency of recent biological science is to deny that acquired characters can be inherited, and therefore to deny that any acts of any man or men could have any effect on the congenital moral nature of their descendants; the taint or fault in { 226} human nature, must be a taint or fault in that original substance which what is called man derived from his pre-human ancestry. To this I reply:--This is no doubt the view which Professor Weismann has made more or less prevalent. The substance of heredity ('germ-plasm') is taken to be a substance _per se_, which has always occupied a special 'sphere' of its own, without any contact with that of 'somatoplasm' further than is required for its lodgement or nutrition; hence it can never be in any degree modified as to its hereditary qualities by use-inheritance. It has been absolutely continuous 'since the first origin of life.'
But this doctrine does not appear yet to have assumed a fixed form[7]; and in its extreme or absolute form it is highly disputable, and rejected by large sections of biologists. Professor Haeckel[8] declares contemptuously that he should feel it more reasonable to accept the Mosaic account of special creations! The late Mr. Romanes, after summing up the evidence on both sides without any contempt, decides: 'No one is thus far entitled to conclude against the possible transmission of acquired characters[9].' Again, 'that this substance of heredity is largely continuous and highly stable, I see many and cogent reasons for believing. But that this substance has been uninterruptedly continuous since the origin of life, or absolutely stable since the origin of sexual propagation, I see even more and better reasons for disbelieving[10].' And he remarks[11], 'I doubt not Weismann { 227} himself would be the first to allow that his theory of heredity encounters greater difficulties in the domain of ethics than in any other--unless indeed, it be that of religion.'